


thicker than water

by tomato_greens



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-18 00:27:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2328611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Petunia had had to walk to Cokeworth High School by herself for the entirety of Year Seven while she waited for Lily to hurry up and finish Year Six; she had not expected to walk by herself all the way through Sixth Form.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thicker than water

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [veryblargh](http://veryblargh.tumblr.com), who prompted _Petunia having a massive crush on Severus Snape when they were children._

The boy was…well, he was a bit awful, if Petunia was being quite honest with herself, a lanky creature with dark, stringy hair and a most unfortunate hook of a nose. He was given to wearing dark clothes that only made him look sallower than he really was, frightfully out of place in the Evans’s neighborhood with its neat rows of houses and its well-tended garden plots. And he was always trailing after Lily with an air of desperation buzzing about him like a cloud of horseflies. 

But he was terribly polite, in his strange, shy way, and there was something about the peculiar slump of his shoulders that struck Petunia as very sad even though he’d never said two words to her altogether. Anyway, Lily liked him, and that had always been enough for Petunia––or at least it had been before they’d had their dreadful, final row about Lily’s stupid freakshow of a school.

Petunia had had to walk to Cokeworth High School all by herself for the entirety of Year Seven while she waited for Lily to hurry up and finish Year Six; she had not expected to walk by herself all the way through Sixth Form. “Tuney, I know you’ll make friends, you’re lovely, anyone could see that,” Lily had promised her even after Petunia had called her––oh, such terrible things!––but of course it hadn’t happened, without Lily there to pave the way.

And now Lily was friendlier with Severus Snape than she was with her own sister. It was the worst thing Petunia could bring herself to imagine, that Lily’s bright regard should be stolen away from her, but she didn’t know how to begin to fix it. Mum was no help at all, cooing over Severus’s weird knobby wand and clapping whenever Lily so much as opened one of her schoolbooks, so Petunia hogged the record player and blasted “Helter Skelter" over and over again, glaring at everyone over the top of her copy of Go Ask Alice.

"That’s a good song," Severus said to her one night on his way out of the house.

"Thanks," Petunia said reflexively, and realized, to her horror, that she was in love.

(It was no surprise, she thought when she let herself think of it, years and years later. She had spent her whole childhood happily in Lily’s shadow. Of course her first love would be a boy who looked at Lily as though she were all the sun he needed.)

\--

NOT!FIC EPILOGUE: Okay, I do not have the strength to do so, but please someone now write 50,000 words of the slow disintegration of Lily and Petunia’s friendship, the terrible argument they had when Snape called Lily “mudblood” and Petunia said, “Lily, maybe it’s for the best––maybe this is a sign that they don’t want you, that you should come home––” and how Lily went white and clutched her wand to her chest like it was more important to her than anything else in the world, and how they were just beginning to reconcile when Lily was killed, and how Petunia turned off all of her feelings and thoughts for the next twenty years.


End file.
